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Beyond Machinima: Rudy Poat and John Gaeta on the Future of Interactive Cinema
RP: Exactly. What's also cool is that you can do things like, introduce characters that were made by the consumer. It's like a big film making mod engine, like the machinima stuff, but we're taking it from the visual stand point that it has to look good. The machinima stuff is fun, but it doesn't look good. GS: It looks more amateur. RP: Yeah. You can't make anything professional with it. We want to make sure that whatever we start with looks great. If it doesn't look great, then we'll wait ten more years 'til it gets there. What we've proven with Trapped Ashes is that you can get stuff to look good now; there is a way to do this. GS: I read that you're currently using Quad SLI machines to do your rendering and run your server. Will this process be useful on consoles as well? RP: Definitely. It could run on a PS3 or the XBox 360. One of the intents is to run on a game platform. Right now it's geared towards running on multiple Nvidia cards. One thing we're toying with is making an executable from a shot of the film that runs like an interactive game, you can take the camera around, move the lights and do whatever you want. I can send this to a director, to someone like John who's very particular about the way things should be. It can be an executable for the 360 or PC, then he can run it, play with it and hit record what he thinks good camera moves and lighting set ups, and it records it. It creates this little meta file that gets sent back to me, we send it to a render farm with a bunch of Nvidia cards and then we know how to create those shots. There are all kinds of ways to use this and we've been using it. To us, it has to be on a Matrix level and it has to be so visually stimulating that everyone responds to it. John Gaeta-directed footage from Trapped Ashes, courtesy Gaeta (click to play) GS: It gets noticed. RP: Yep. GS: So you would send that out, they hit record and it saves their actions to a file. RP: Right, and that would come back to us and we'd render it. The secret with what we're doing is the layered shader stuff. Actually it's a lot of the same technology that we used to layer shaders for RenderMan in the first Matrix movie. It's just layers upon layers, we keep layering shaders on top of each other. Whether it's real time, or two seconds a frame, it doesn't really matter for us. Once we have that meta file, we can give it complete film quality, Matrix level with huge frame rates, and instead of making it real time we can make it three seconds a frame. Now, we have a render farm that we can render out CG film, something like a Shrek level, on eight Nvidia cards. GS: So you end up saving a lot of time? RP: Right. GS: So, you can have it running on a server and have people log in to it, how's it limited by bandwidth? RP: With Trapped Ashes we had three people logged in at the same time. We had a lighter, animator and camera man in there at the same time without a frame hit at all. GS: I read that you can use MAYA and 3D Studio with this system. What level of interaction do they currently have? RP: They're just used for models and textures. Building the assets and putting them in the engine. What we've built is like a simplified game engine that leans completely towards visual quality, interactive television and interactive film making. This is a mechanism for interactive story telling. We're not trying to make games, but that happens on the side anyway. |
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